Published 7:39 pm, Saturday, April 27, 2013

All five living presidents gathered in Texas on Thursday for a feel-good moment at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which is supposed to symbolize the legacy Bush has been trying to polish.

But there is another building, far from Dallas on land leased from Cuba, that symbolizes Bush's legacy in a darker, truer way: the military penal complex at Guantanamo Bay where Bush imprisoned hundreds of men after the Sept. 11 attacks, a vast majority guilty of no crime.

It became the embodiment of his dangerous expansion of executive power and the lawless detentions, secret prisons and torture that went along with them. It is now also a reminder of President Barack Obama's failure to close the prison as he promised when he took office, and of the malicious interference by Congress in any effort to justly try and punish the Guantanamo inmates.

There are still 166 men there — virtually all of them held without charges, some for more than a decade. More than half have been cleared for release but are still imprisoned because of a law that requires individual Pentagon waivers.

Of the rest, some are said to have committed serious crimes, including terrorism, but the military tribunals created by Bush are dysfunctional and not credible, despite Obama's improvements. Congress long ago banned the transfer of prisoners to the federal criminal justice system where they belong and are far more likely to receive fair trials and long sentences if convicted.

That prison should never have been opened. It was nothing more than Bush's attempt to evade accountability by placing prisoners in another country. The courts rejected that ploy, but Bush never bothered to fix the problem. Now, shockingly, the Pentagon is actually considering spending $200 million for expansions clearly aimed at a permanent operation.

Whatever Bush says about how comfortable he is with his "tough" choices, the country must recognize the steep price being paid for what is essentially a political prison. Just as hunger strikes at the infamous Maze Prison in Northern Ireland indelibly stained Britain's human rights record, so Guantanamo stains America's.